Justice

He was a destitute deserving of fairness.
Inflamed by the injustice he saw
He swore to equalize, and claim his share,
And renovate the broken law.

He grabbed his share, and explained hard
How his toil wasn't a lucky draw ;
Fairness and justice now wait on him,
While he makes love to the broken law.

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Romance

The lure of utopia glistened in the offing---
Gulping my doubleshot espresso
And leftovers from the carnival of youth,
Donning my best from the inventory of purposes,
I kickstarted my retrograde enthusiasm
And rode through the gates of defiance, chasing make-believe,
Into the eyes of desire and desperation,
Chanting oblivion.

My combed hair ruffled in the willow gale,
My run-down collar mushy as loam,
I waited outside the ebb of history,
Piecing together a palatable prose.

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Blame
Oppressed by the weight of responsibility,
He blamed.
To protect her image before the captious,
She blamed.
Seeking relief from the torment of injustice,
You blamed.
Running the rickety narrative of inequity,
We blamed.
Obligated by superciliousness,
They blamed.
Invigorated by the paralytic practice,
I blamed.

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Minion
Money is a potent drug
With uses plentiful;
Abuse it and you turn
Dependent, resistant,
With withdrawals painful.
Money's a god vilified,
A devil eulogised;
A michevous paradox
That makes the world
Both turn and go berserk.
Money's game-changing;
A tasty carcinogen.
It's a philanthrope
And a misanthrope;
It's a malodorous perfume.
Money produces chasers
and keepers and robbers
and givers and movers
And shakers and renouncers
Of disconcerting renown.
Money is the psyche
Of the compelling
Narrative of humankind;
A vessel adrift on the ocean
Of time, peddling destiny.


Sankhasubhra Banerjee

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Obsoletion
Why don't they look up to you anymore
Why don't they see sense in what you say
Why do they drive you to importune
Why won't they care at all anyway?
Why don't they pay heed to ceremony
Why do they trifle with your tradition
Why are they besotted with the fleeting
Why do they lack appreciation?
Why do they seem like magic realists
Living and breathing paradoxes
What thaumaturgy are they privy to
That work upon the clouds' recesses?
They say they have their lives arrayed in stacks;
They say they have figured cracks to cover their tracks.

Sankhasubhra Banerjee

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He Ear Hear Art Heat Hate

Our heart's a nuclear reactor
Capacitated with illimited
Divine goodness and love.
But for a stable core,
The hurt detonates
Wreaking destruction.

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Idioma
I lived in the hills by the sea
Where the peaks were high and the valleys low;
The crest and trough looked breathtaking
From a distance away a stone's throw.
My raft bobbed on the ebb and flow
Of the ocean tides at hours wee;
The starlit night sky saw the moon
In her perigee and apogee.
In fogs so thick and mists so thin
I looked back at my high and low,
When I bumped into the epiphany:
If life's a river, I go with the flow.

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Dysgeusia
The bitter taste of unfulfillment
Hangs heavily
At the tip of my tongue.

No amount of rinsing
Washes it away;
Blending with every flavour.

I cannot recall anymore
How I sensed and distinguished
The degrees of pungency.

What I now savour
Are differences in texture
And recondite aromas.

-

We come from a point
And we run in circles,
Or orbits if you may;
And the orbit enlarges
And we spiral into growth
In wider circles.

Then comes a time
When the cheeks of the circle
Are stretched by force
And elements are added
Dropping momenta,
Narrowing orbits
And we regress
To the point.

Today I imagined life
To be a conical spring
Fixed to a convex mirror
Where fate is
Ad infinitum
Closer than it appears.

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Halibut In A Dried Sea
When the fires of hell dried the sea,
The halibut was brought to a lake;
The righteous confines promised to protect
As it did the seaweed and the snake.

The halibut reminisced the days of yore
Of Jacob, Joshua and Saul,
And the divine spectacle atop Sinai,
And the deliverance of Paul.

The halibut twitched in his nightmare
Of crusaders' ships docking at ports;
At the holocaust of reprobates left behind
With gory footprints of cohorts.

The following morrow the halibut was out,
The hour of his salvation had finally come;
The oath-bound pubescent served halibut stew
To the parihas who sought refuge in His Kingdom.

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